The Burglar in the Rye

“I guess it’s no great trick to disguise a man nobody’s ever seen in the first place, a camera-shy fellow who’s elevated anonymity to the level of an art form. The beard-and-beret combination was perfect, because it made you a type, the distinguished older man taking the trouble to look artsy-bohemian. And the perfectly trimmed silver beard’s so eye-catching that it’s what registers the strongest when anybody looks at you. I saw the beard and I knew I’d never seen it before on anybody else, and that meant I hadn’t seen you before. But I had.”

“I suppose I wanted you to know,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so goddam much time hanging around the bookshop.”

“You even bought books.”

“You didn’t make much money off me.”

“Not on the books you bought from me,” I said. “I’m talking about the books you bought from Pericles Book Shop and sold to me. The books you said some woman brought in. I was shelving them, and something made me look on page 151 of one of them. That’s where Stavros Vlachos pencils in his code cost. He’d marked that book, and you know what? He’d marked all of them.”

“I didn’t know about that.”

“That’s why he does it there, instead of on the flyleaf like everybody else. I called him, and he remembered the sale and described the man who’d picked out the books and paid in cash. He told me what you paid, too, and you took a major loss on the deal, didn’t you?”

He smiled. “You told me how to make a small fortune in the book business, remember?” He shrugged. “I was lurking in your shop under false pretenses, and I guess I felt I owed you something.”

“How’d you get there the first time? You must have followed her.”

“Her,” he said heavily. “I saw her at the hotel. I took a room there, that’s how come I got to sit around the lobby reading a magazine. I blew into town wearing a wig and sunglasses and checked in under a phony name. Not Gulliver Fairborn, and not Henry Walden, either. And I was just settling in when that wretched child showed up.”

“That’s fu

“Oh?”

“She told me how you wrote to her in Virginia, upset at the prospect of your letters to Landau being auctioned off. She was on a mission to retrieve those letters and return them to you. According to her, she’s accomplished it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Half of it, anyway. I had a phone call from her while I was with Ray. She got the letters. Then she called you in Oregon -”

“ Oregon?”

“You get around, don’t you? She called you, and I guess all you wanted now was assurance the letters were destroyed, because she fed them to a paper shredder and burned what it spat out. I wonder where she got it.”

“Got what?”

“The paper shredder. Did she bring it with her from Charlottesville? Do you suppose they have them at Kinko’s? And how much do they charge to use them?”

He sighed. “It would be nice,” he said, “to run Tiny Alice through a shredder. Or a wood chipper, say. If she got her hands on those letters, then they haven’t been destroyed. And God knows they’re not going to be returned to me.”

“She’s going to sell them?”

“I don’t know what she’s going to do with them. Did she tell you about our liaison? The love affair of the century, starring Alice Cottrell as Lolita?”

“Briefly.”

“I’ll bet. What did she say?”

I gave him an abridged version and he shook his head throughout. He kept shaking his head, and when I’d finished he took a sip of rye and let out a long sigh. “I did write to her,” he said. “There was something in that New Yorker piece of hers that struck a chord. And I received letter after letter in response. Her own situation was impossible, she wrote. She had to get away. Her father was molesting her almost daily and her mother was beating her with a wire coat hanger, that sort of thing. Eventually she wore me down. I told her she could come for a brief visit.”

“And?”

“And the next thing I knew she had arrived, and she was harder to get rid of than a summer cold.”

“I understand she stayed for three years.”

“More like six months.”

“Oh.”

“She had her own bed, but she’d wait until I fell asleep and then crawl into mine.”

“She said she was a virgin.”

“Maybe she was. I certainly did nothing to change her status, much as she tried to get me interested. She had more tricks than a White House intern, but so what? She was a scrawny little runt of a kid, and I’m not wired that way.” He shook his head. “She’s probably hoping there’s a letter or two where I confide in my agent about the exciting young woman who’s just come into my life.”

“What was in the letters, Henry?”

He smiled. “‘Henry.’ I guess you might as well go on calling me that. What was in the letters? I don’t even remember. Anthea was my agent, and it was a close author-agent relationship.”

“And you wanted the letters back.”

“I wanted them to disappear, to cease to exist.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want people pawing over them and finding little glimpses of me in them. It’s the same reason I live my life the way I do.”

“Yet people find you in everything you write.”

“They find the part I’m willing to show,” he said. He looked off into the distance. “It’s fiction,” he said, “and I get to make it the way I want it to be, with a clay factory relocated from Huntington to Peru, say, if that’s where I want it to be. I don’t care who reads my fiction, or what they think they find there.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” His eyes probed mine. “Say you’re having a conversation with somebody. You don’t mind if he can hear the sentences you’re speaking, do you?”

“If I minded, I wouldn’t say them in the first place.”

“Exactly. But suppose, while he was listening to you, he was also reading your mind. Picking up the unvoiced thoughts buzzing around in your brain. How would you like that?”

“I get it.”

“The fiction I write is my conversation with the world. My private life is private, an unspoken conversation with myself, and I don’t want any mind-readers eavesdropping on it.”

“So it doesn’t matter who gets the letters,” I said. “A collector or a scholar or a university library, or even Alice Cottrell. It’s the same invasion of privacy wherever the letters wind up.”

“Exactly.”

“Isis Gauthier,” I said.

“Don’t know a thing about her, except that she’s stu

“Karen Kassenmeier.”

“Who’s she?”

“A dead thief,” I said. “How about the hotel clerks? The failed actor who dyes his hair, his name’s Carl, and the myopic accountant-type, whose name I never got.”

“I believe it’s Owen. And there’s at least one more clerk, a woman named Paula, with a big nose and a chin like Dick Tracy.”

We were still at the Bum Rap and my companion was still supporting the rye whiskey distillers of America, but I’d switched to Perrier.

“I didn’t really get to know any of the clerks,” he said. “Or anybody else at the hotel. I went there with some fantasy of talking Anthea into returning the letters, but I couldn’t even work out how to approach her. I couldn’t offer her the kind of money the letters would bring at auction, and I couldn’t threaten her, either. What could I do, sue her? Charge her with unethical conduct?”

“Stab her,” I suggested, “and take the letters by force.”

“Not my style. As a matter of fact, action of any sort’s not my style. And getting to the hotel was about as much action as I managed. Then I sat around the lobby, wearing a wig and sunglasses, and drinking enough rye whiskey to face the world each day.”

“I understand it can do more than Milt or malt.”

“‘To let us know it’s not our fault,’” he finished. “Where on earth did you come up with that? Did I blurt it out the other night?”

“ Alice quoted you.”

“Christ,” he said. “And she remembered after all these years?”